Into the Dark, Blumhouse and Hulu’s year-long, monthly horror series has improved with each episode. December’s installment, Pooka, was kinky and weird, but didn’t quite stick the landing. January’s, New Year, New You, was a slow-build thriller powered by great performances and February’s Down was the best yet. March’s installment, Treehouse, has the potential to be great.
Written and directed by former Psych star, James Roday, it stars Jimmi Simpson (Westworld) as a celebrity chef who goes to his family’s remote mansion for the weekend and encounters a seemingly-harmless bachelorette party filled with other TV-recognizable faces like Brooklyn Nine-Nine‘s Stephanie Beatriz and Mary McCormack, most recently of The Kids Are Alright. Still, despite all that talent, Treehouse is possibly the series’ worst installment yet.
To his credit, none of that is really Simpson’s fault. He’s actually quite good as Peter Rake, an obvious riff on Gordon Ramsey and Mario Batali who’s an ass on his reality competition show, but softens around his daughter. He plays Peter as obviously smug, but charming too. In an early scene, Peter stops at a bait and tackle shop on his way to the house and realizes he knows the owner, Lonnie (Michael Weston), from high school. He’s obviously put off by Lonnie’s quiet intensity, but he makes light of the situation for himself and the audience, joking after Lonnie refers to his “mother” that they should build some rooms, poke holes in the walls and call it Bait Motel.
Peter is similarly fast-talking with the girls from the bachelorette party, particularly Julianna Guill’s Kara. The pair share fabulous chemistry as they trade barbs in each of their encounters and those are some of the film’s best moments. When Kara comes knocking one night after the girls’ cabin loses power, she gamely jokes that Peter has Ted Bundy’s cheekbones after Peter jokes he’s not a Ted Buddy type when she hesitates to follow him in to look for candles and flashlights. There’s an edge to that interaction and it carries over to all of Peter’s interactions with the girls, but not all of them work as well as that moment.
While McCormack’s Lilith has a similar dynamic with Peter as Kara and Shaunette Renée Wilson’s Marie has a wonderful air of challenge, Beatriz doesn’t fare so well. The actress is used to modifying her voice for her roles (her BK99 register is at least an octave lower than her real voice), but she makes an odd choice here by giving her character, Elena, a Puerto Rican accent. While the decision has to do with plot, Beatriz doesn’t have full control and given a lot of Roday’s other directing choices that are too at odds with the normal conversation scenes (rooms lit in intense primary colors, shots at an odd angle or through a doorway or gauzy fabric, unnecessary flashbacks to things we’ve already seen), it seems unlikely he gave Beatriz much help when he can’t even establish a coherent tone.
Though Roday has previously worked with much of the cast, they often seem a little lost. When Peter jokes with Lonnie about his mother, we’re supposed to be on his side, but when he talks to his sister later or gets a little dismissive with the girls when they start talking about pregnancy and motherhood, it’s unclear if we’re supposed to think he’s a total asshole. As the girls make fun of Peter after he cooks them dinner, the banter turns just a little too sharp and while we eventually learn why the girls seem so predisposed to dislike Peter, it seems overblown in that moment and the interactions quickly become unpleasant to watch.
That said, it’s totally possible that part of the reason the film feels confused is that Roday is obscuring his point for the first half. It’s difficult to talk about that point without spoiling it somewhat, but it’s also impossible to critique the film without doing so. Simply put, the members of the bachelorette party are there to punish Peter for his past behavior. Despite his charming façade, Peter is a serial harasser and the girls torture him for it. Roday undoubtedly meant the story as a fantasy for women to take out their collective rage on the legions of horrible men exposed since #MeToo began, but Roday never takes the time to make the women real people.
Sure, it’s easy to feel the same outrage that fuels their actions, but for the most part, Peter’s actions did not directly affect them and they exist more as embodiments of vengeance for specific types of crimes. Surely the last year and a half makes it easy to understand why Elena would act as a stand in for all women of color or why Marie would want to stand in for any woman who is harassed in the work place, but it doesn’t excuse the fact that Roday doesn’t bother to make anybody except the pretty white girl a full person.
It’s difficult to say if Treehouse would have been more successful if it had been written by a man. After all, Luca Guadagnino’s Suspiria remake was cathartic and empowering even without a woman in the director’s chair or behind the script. However, Roday does make one mistake it’s hard to imagine a female filmmaker making: the film doesn’t remotely pass the Bechdel test. There’s a chance for it to happen near the end, when two female characters are talking over the event that led to the coven’s decision to punish Peter, but Roday takes us away so we can see Peter one last time. The last thing we see of the women’s conversation is the two from afar, their lips moving but their words about their shared trauma inaudible.
Rating: 4/10
Blumhouse’s Into the Dark: Treehouse starts streaming on Hulu March 1st.
